Religion

06/11/2016

Flickerers are on a roll: our own Kevin Timpe is interviewed at The Prosblogion. Apparently he's moving from my own undergrad institution--Northwest Nazarene University--to take a chair at Calvin College (replacing Plantinga!). While I'm sad that he's leaving NNU (which has produced a number of tenured profs disproportionate to its size), I'm glad he's still contributing to matters of agency related to disability studies. Read up!

03/25/2015

Jerry Coyne says yes. Sorry to interrupt Gregg’s great posts, but I thought people here would be interested in this claim at the widely-read blog Why Evolution is True. And I thought it might provide a way to re-ask some questions that have come up in Gregg’s posts.

Coyne thinks compatibilists are trying to save free will by redefining it in order to avoid making people feel bad about not having the sort of agency they feel they have and to avoid bad social consequences. He thinks these two reasons are also the main motivations for creationists arguing against evolution. Hence, he thinks compatibilists are like creationists.

I won’t bother disputing the claims about compatibilists’ motivations (or creationists’).* Instead, I want to link his claims to the questions discussed this month about reference-fixing.

02/06/2015

Really interesting article--"Lucky and Good: How Tom Brady Became the Greatest" over at Grantland on the role of luck in making Tom Brady the greatest QB of all time (unless you prefer guys who put up huge stats in September and October and then fold when the temperature dips below 45 degrees. Or guys who played with 10 hall of famers in a pre-salary cap era.) Some key quotes:

"Anyone who’s ever been the greatest at anything has gotten outrageously lucky...Luck is supposed to matter. A charmed existence is part of the myth behind any regular person who gets turned into a folk hero."

"This is how sports work, and it’s actually how life works. We worship greatness and all the qualities that give birth to it, but we forget how arbitrary this can be."

It reminds me a lot of Paul Russell's criminally under-discussed article (seriously, it should be a federal crime not to talk about this paper) "Free Will, Art, and Morality."

12/17/2014

We just had Sam Harris on for a very long podcast on the costs and benefits of religion, free will, the self, moral responsibility, blame, vengeance, guilt, and all that other good stuff. Much of the second half features the new me arguing vehemently with the old me, although Sam does add a couple of twists on the skeptical position in addition to his Pereboom-style argument. In the end we reach a dialectal stalemate--with John duly acknowledged on that--but there's some good stuff along the way. If you want to skip around, here are some rough time markers.

2. Therefore, we epistemic inferiors should also regard View L as awesome/lame

There are, of course, lots of ways to refine the basic argument. But, I take it that we all accept some version of this as a matter of ordinary belief management. (Imagine I go on to mutter words like "testimony" and "epistemic division of labor" and "doxastic economy") The most familiar case is individual. My views about the effectiveness of organic pest management is shaped by a friend of mine who does this stuff for a living. More prosaically, my sense about the plausibility of, say, Darwinism is parasitic on what biologists and philosophers of science tell me (my beliefs adapt to what they say, so to speak), and my sense about whether Toyota Siennas are better than Honda Odysseys is shaped by what my betters at Consumer Reports tell me.

Now let's add a temporal dimension to the picture. Should we care what our future epistemic betters will think? Suppose the philosophers of the future will be even smarter and more epistemically awesome than we are. I suspect something like this is very likely to be true. They will know more stuff than we know, they will stand on the shoulders of taller giants, and they will have the benefits of whatever cognitive enhancements the tech and pharmaceutical companies of the world figure out between now and then. Plus, the Flynn Effect.

So what? Well, I wonder whether there are interesting consequences for how we think about some current philosophical debates.

03/14/2010

Welcome to Flickers of Freedom. We decided to
create this blog to fill the vacuum left by the closing of the Garden of Forking Paths.We aim to promote the discussion of
issues in the philosophy of action, concentrating on free will, moral
responsibility and agency. We hope to build on the success of the Garden (and avoid the problems that led
to its closing).

The Garden of Forking Paths was a success. It lasted nearly six years and it provided a
forum for high quality discussion. Some of its posts led directly to journal
publications; many contributed less directly to publications. It also enabled
philosophers working in different parts of the United States, and in different
parts of the world, to establish friendships and a genuine community. Many of us played a part in that success. But we also acknowledge some responsibility
for its eventual closing. We took the Garden
for granted; we were less active than we should have been. We only realized how important the forum was
for us, personally and professionally, when we were faced with the prospect of
losing it. We hope that the experience will jolt all of us out of our lethargy,
and that Flickers of Freedom will
carry on the best traditions of the Garden.

We believe
that our renewed commitment to sustaining a lively agency community will help
to avoid the problems that led to the closing of the Garden. Beyond this, we are taking steps to ensure that post
quality is high and that postings are frequent. Taking Pea Soup, the ethics blog, as our model, we have decided at least
initially to limit the pool of contributors to professionals working in the
philosophy or psychology of agency.We
are also setting down a requirement that contributors contribute at least two
posts a year to the blog (not including brief pointers to news items or
upcoming conferences, papers, etc.). In addition, comments will be moderated.
Commenting on the blog will be open to all comers; the only requirement is that
comments be (reasonably) polite and on topic.

A word on
the name. Flickers of Freedom is a
phrase introduced into philosophical debate by John Martin Fischer, in his
highly influential discussion of the Frankfurt-style cases that help motivate
his semi-compatibilism. We adopt the
name for this blog not because we expect that it will be appropriate to
describe it as merely a flicker of
freedom, but in tribute to John Martin Fischer. Not only is his work a central
reference for all us, but we also want to acknowledge the role he played in
establishing and guiding the Garden.
He was pivotal to its success, though he cannot be blamed for its eventual
closure. We hope the lively, penetrating but always generous philosophical
voice of John Fischer will be echoed here at Flickers.

These are
exciting times in the philosophy of agency. In the past 12 months, at least
half a dozen important books on many different aspects of the topic have been
published, as well as dozens of papers in the best journals. There are new
developments in the defense of the main positions (libertarianism,
compatibilism, and skepticism about free will), in the science of agency, in
discussions of moral responsibility, and much more. There has also been the
establishment of an exciting new interdisciplinary free will project at Florida State University. We expect Flickers
to benefit from, and help to foster this activity. Let’s flicker!